2024-01-10 23:07:15
It’s the daily struggle for one’s own existence that almost nobody seems to care about. For the eighth time, the humanitarian aid organization CARE is pointing out the ten hotspots that were least reported on last year. And for the second time in a row, all of the crises listed in the “Breaking the Silence” report are on the African continent. It seems that the world pays least attention to the places where suffering is most severe.
Together with the media monitoring service “Meltwater”, CARE searched five million online reports from January 1st to September 30th, 2023 in the languages Arabic, German, English, French and Spanish for reports of humanitarian crises. 48 such crises were identified, affecting at least one million people. The ranking included some disasters that nobody cares about year after year, but there were also some crises that were new this year.
As in the previous year, Angola took first place, with just 1,049 online reports found. This is despite the fact that droughts, floods and hunger in Angola mean that more than seven million people need humanitarian assistance. For comparison: 273,279 online articles appeared worldwide about the new Barbie film in the same period last year.
CARE Austria managing director Andrea Barschdorf-Hager attributed the fact that certain trouble spots are hardly reported to, among other things, austerity measures in the media: “The global humanitarian need has never been as great as in 2023. This was also reflected in international reporting. It It is clear that more recent events such as the earthquakes in Syria and Turkey, the war in Ukraine and the escalating conflict in the Middle East dominate the headlines. Many crises in Africa have existed for a long time, which makes reporting difficult. But we also see that that the media’s human and financial resources are decreasing, which leads to less foreign reporting.”
In second and third place are two other states, Zambia and Burundi, whose crises have already been mentioned several times in previous CARE reports. The Central African Republic, in sixth place this year, has been featured in each of the eight reports so far. However, Senegal (fourth place), Mauritania (fifth place) and Uganda (ninth place) are new.
However, it is hardly surprising that Africa is particularly present on this list: “According to the United Nations, almost 300 million people worldwide will need humanitarian assistance in 2024 – almost half of them in Africa,” said Deepmala Mahla, CARE Director for Humanitarian Aid. One should not forget that hunger is almost always man-made. “In order to save lives, in addition to more attention, sufficient funding for humanitarian aid is needed. Last year only 35 percent of the required financial resources were made available for humanitarian aid, which is definitely not enough,” appealed Mahla.
CARE plans to announce further details at a press conference on Thursday morning.
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